[mythtv-users] MythTV Light / Rasp Pi 3 Live TV quality

[Peter Bennett]

On 11/07/2016 02:10 PM, Ken Bass wrote:
> When I start watching Live TV (or change a channel) on the Rasp Pi 3
> frontend, there is an initial 5 seconds of muted audio, then some
> audio, then a bit more muted, before everything works. (I tried
> turning off OSD Fade). There are occasional audio dropouts.
>
> I am not sure this is acceptable for a cable box replacement (which is
> my goal). Occasionally I get an audio dropout here or there too.
>
> Is this typical for HD recording playback on a Rasp Pi 3 with MythTV
> frontend? Live TV has never been a strong suite of MythTV in my
> opinion and maybe this is just an indication of that.
>
> Yesterday I tried a Kodi frontend for the first time with the MythtTV
> PVR plugin and did not see this issue. In fact the video quality
> (using HDHR Prime and HD-PVR) seems much better with Kodi than even
> openmax high quality. I have not figured out how to get commercial
> skip working with recordings under Kodi yet but I might just use Kodi
> which is a shame before I wanted to stay with the MythTV frontend.
>
>
There is some audio on and off during the first second or two of
playback. This is while it is getting audio and video synchronized. I
think it is more pronounced on Raspberry Pi than with a more powerful
frontend, because of the reduced processing power of the Raspberry Pi.
You should not get audio dropouts once it has settled down. With Live TV
you can get pauses for a few seconds if the frontend is getting ahead of
the recording. They should stop happening after a short time.

My problem with Kodi was that if I used left or right arrow to skip
forward or back the audio came out of sync. To me, lip sync being off is
very irritating. Perhaps Kodi has resolved that issue.

FWIW I have returned all of my cable boxes and I am using exclusively
MythTV with Raspberry Pi and amd64 frontends for TV watching.